Organic electronic devices usually comprise laterally structured or patterned active layers. One example for such an electronic device is a full-colour display device comprising a number of pixels, each pixel being subdivided into three colour sub-pixels comprising different organic layers and generating either red or green or blue light each.
Since photolithographic methods used in the production of other electronic devices are generally not applicable to organic layers, a widely used method for patterning an organic layer is the use of a shadow mask. For each colour, a respective OLED stack of organic material layers is vacuum-deposited through a dedicated shadow mask. Problems of this technique are the resolution and size of the shadow mask as well as its thermal expansion and a relatively long processing time resulting from the method. Therefore, the shadow mask method is considered as being not applicable for mass production of large-scale organic electroluminescence displays.
Means of improving the accuracy of patterns and overlay are self-alignment which are discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,817,242 (Biebuyck et al., “Stamp for a lithographic process”) and in US 2001/0013294 (B. Michel et al., “Stamp device for printing a pattern on a surface of a substrate”). Means of improving the pattern stability against collapse under load are discussed in the papers: “Siloxane Polymers for High-Resolution, High-Accuracy Soft Lithography” (H. Schmid and B. Michel, Macromolecules 33, 3042-3049 (2000)), “Printing Meets Lithography: Soft Approaches to High-Resolution Patterning” (B. Michel et al., IBM J. Res. Develop. 45(5), 697-720 (2001)) and “Conformal contact and pattern stability of stamps used for soft lithography” (A. Bietsch and B. Michel, J. Appl. Phys. 88(7), 4310 (2000)).